Ideas

Israel’s Bold, Risky Attack

The Israeli campaign may be necessary, but preventive wars carry great moral and practical risks.

First published in The Atlantic on June 12, 2025

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic

June 19, 2025 | reading time: 5 Min.

At the end of the classic 1972 film The Godfather, the new don of the family, Michael Corleone, attends a baptism while his men wipe out the heads of the other New York Mafia families—all of them Michael’s enemies, and all intending one day to do him harm. Rather than wait for their eventual attacks, Michael dispatches them himself. “Today, I settled all family business,” Michael says to his traitorous brother-in-law, before having him killed.